refer to alleged insults by opponents. Thus Jeremy Guscott, the former England and
Lions rugby player, remarked that “nothing is a better motivator than being bad-mouthed
by the opposition” (Guscott, 1997, p. 44). On the other hand, there is little or no empirical
evidence to indicate that pep talks channel players’ arousal effectively. Recall from
Chapter 2 that motivation requires direction as well as intensity. Clearly, the problem
with rousing pep talks is that they usually lack this important directional component
(Anshel, 1995).
The “inverted-U” hypothesisAccording to the “inverted-U” hypothesis (Oxendine, 1984), the relationship between
arousal and performance is curvilinear rather than linear. In other words, increased
arousal is postulated to improve skilled performance up to a certain point, beyond which
further increases in arousal may impair it. To illustrate this theory, imagine being
required to sit an examination just after you wake up flow arousal) or after you have run a
marathon (high arousal). At both of these extreme ends of the arousal continuum, your
academic performance would probably be poor. On the other hand, if you had a good
night’s sleep and felt properly prepared for the exam, you should perform at your best.
This proposition that arousal has diminishing returns on task performance is derived from
the Yerkes-Dodson law (Yerkes and Dodson, 1908). Briefly, this law proposed that there
is an optimal level of arousal for performance on any task. Specifically, performance
tends to be poor at low or high levels of arousal but is best at intermediate levels of
arousal. A summary of the Yerkes-Dodson law is presented in Box 3.4.
Box 3.4 Of mice and men (and women)...the “Yerkes-Dodson law”Although the Yerkes-Dodson law is widely cited in sport psychology, its origins lie in
research on animal learning in the early 1900s. Specifically, in 1908, Robert Yerkes and
John Dodson reported experiments on the relationship between arousal level and task
difficulty. Briefly, they devised a paradigm in which mice could avoid electrical shocks
by entering the brighter of two compartments. Arousal level was varied by changing the
intensity of the electrical shocks administered to the mice. Task difficulty was
manipulated by varying the contrast in brightness between the two compartments. Results
showed that the amount of practice required by the mice to learn the discrimination task
increased as the difference in brightness between the compartments decreased. In other
words, when the task was easy (i.e., when the brighter compartment was easy to identify),
the mice performed best at high levels of arousal (i.e., larger electric shocks). However,
when the task was difficult (i.e., when there was little difference between the brightness
of the two compartments), the mice performed best at low levels of arousal (i.e., small
electrical shocks). These findings led Yerkes and Dodson (1908) to conclude that “an
easily acquired habit, that is, one which does not demand difficult sense discrimination or
complex associations, may readily be formed under strong stimulation, whereas a
difficult habit may be acquired readily only under relatively weak stimulation” (pp. 481–
482), Thus the Yerkes-Dodson law consists of two parts.
"Psyching up" and "calming down": anxiety in sport 81